After admitting despair, Nokia is ready to load up their gorgeous hardware with Microsoft’s phone operating system software, Windows Phone 7. More »
It’s happened. Former Microsoft exec and current Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has married his future and his past in the holy matrimony of a “strategic alliance.” Windows Phone is becoming Nokia’s “principal smartphone strategy,” but there’s a lot more to this hookup — scope out the official press release just after the break. Microsoft’s Bing and adCenter will provide search and ad services across Nokia devices, while Nokia will look to innovate “on top of the platform” with things like its traditional strength in imaging. Ovi Maps will be a core part of Microsoft’s mapping services and will be integrated with Bing, while Nokia’s content store will be integrated into (read: assimilated by) Microsoft’s Marketplace. Xbox Live and Office will also, as is to be expected, feature on these brave new Microkia handsets. An open letter on Nokia’s Conversations site, penned jointly by Stephen Elop and Steve Ballmer, sets out the foregoing details along with the following statement of intent:
“There are other mobile ecosystems. We will disrupt them. There will be challenges. We will overcome them. Success requires speed. We will be swift. Together, we see the opportunity, and we have the will, the resources and the drive to succeed.”
Nokia and Microsoft enter strategic alliance on Windows Phone, Bing, Xbox Live and more originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Feb 2011 02:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Pardon us while we catch our breath… Nokia’s bombshell of an announcement’s going to require some serious internal tinkering to execute upon the new strategy. As such, there’s a big-time reorganization effort being kicked off today in order to accelerate the company towards its new goals. Here are some of the highlights:
The new team that will leadership team that will drive the effort consists of Stephen Elop, Esko Aho, Juha Akras, Jerri DeVard, Colin Giles, Rich Green, Jo Harlow, Timo Ihamuotila, Mary McDowell, Kai Oistamo, Tero Ojanpera, Louise Pentland and Niklas Savander. Unsurprisingly, Alberto Torres, former head of MeeGo, has quit. Here are some of the key execs:
So really, Nokia is maintaining most of its executive staff, unlike the rumors coming into today.
Continue reading Nokia execs reshuffled in Microsoft-centered Elopcalypse
Nokia execs reshuffled in Microsoft-centered Elopcalypse originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 11 Feb 2011 02:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This article was written on April 13, 2007 by CyberNet.
The rumors were right, Leopard has been delayed again. This time, until at least October. Apple’s official announcement says:
“The iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS® X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.”
You can definitely tell where Apple’s priorities are right now. Maybe that shift in focus came when Apple dropped “computer” from their name back in January. When Apple released their first quarter results in January, 48% of their sales came from the iPod alone. Add in iTunes sales, and the soon to be iPhone, and their computers will definitely be last on the totem pole.
Their focus tends to point towards potential new customers that they’ll scoop up in the future instead of an equal focus on both the past loyal customers who are just waiting for new software, and the new ones.
If you’ll recall, Leopard was originally supposed to ship before Vista, and then it got moved to right around when Vista was going to get released. After that didn’t happen, it was pushed to Spring 07’, and now at the earliest, it will be an October 07’ release.
What’s also ironic is that two weeks ago, rumor had it that Leopard was going to be pushed back to October 2007, but because of Vista. It was said that Apple wanted the new operating system to support Vista through an integrated version of Boot Camp. But then a week later, Boot Camp 1.2 was released to work with Vista. The rumor was at least half correct.
Or maybe there is more truth to that. Users are reporting problems with the new Boot Camp 1.2 software, even though it’s supposed to support Vista. It sounds to me like there’s a lot going on that Apple needs to iron out before Leopard will be ready for its grand entrance.
Also funny: Mary Jo Foley over at ZDNet says that if she were Microsoft, she’d start a new campaign – “Cupertino, start your photocopiers!” This of course, mocks Apple’s previous campaign, “Redmond, start your photocopiers.”Their excuse is that they pulled their engineers from Leopard to the iPhone project, much like what caused the Vista delay when Microsoft pulled engineers to work on XP Service Pack 2. Their campaign would go something like, “Who’s copying who now, huh? We thought of the not-enough-engineers excuse way back in 2004!”
Source: eWeek.com (Thanks for the tip CoryC)
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Microsoft and Nokia are close to cementing a partnership to produce mobile phones together, according to multiple reports.
It’s like that celebrity couple you never expected to hook up, but who somehow did. Even a former Nokia employee was betting against the prospect of the phone maker working with Microsoft, which would involve shipping Nokia hardware with Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 operating system.
But the odds of the two partnering up are looking more and more likely. Bloomberg on Thursday published a report claiming that Microsoft and Nokia are likely to announce the new partnership on Friday. Earlier, The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday published an internal memo that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop sent to staff, and it suggests the company is about to make a dramatic move.
“I have learned that we are standing on a burning platform,” Elop said in the memo, referring to Nokia’s decline in market share. “”We are working on a path forward — a path to rebuild our market leadership. When we share the new strategy on Feb. 11, it will be a huge effort to transform our company.”
All indications suggest the transformation involves Nokia scrapping the mobile operating system that comes on its phones, Symbian OS, and ceding control of the software experience to Microsoft.
This shift would indeed be radical, but it’s an understandable move. Nokia has steadfastly relied on an open-source OS called Symbian. Nokia and Symbian have been the worldwide leader in the phone market for years, but some analysts say the OS could soon be dethroned by Google’s Android OS, which has a more modern user interface and several manufacturing partners. Wired.com late last year began documenting the slow death of Symbian in the wake of more modern interfaces offered by the iPhone and Android devices.
Symbian’s decline has continued as Nokia’s presence in market share plummets. Nokia’s share of the handset market in the fourth quarter of 2010 fell to 27.1 percent, down from 36.6 percent in the year-ago quarter.
“Market share is an existential threat to Symbian, it imperils the very existence of the platform,” said Gartner analyst Nick Jones. “And the main reason Symbian is losing share is the user experience, which isn’t competitive with Apple or Android.”
Shipping phones with Windows Phone 7 would be a quick fix to bring Nokia devices more up to date. Released late last year, Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 is the software giant’s fresh new start on a mobile operating system after completely scrapping its predecessor Windows Mobile.
Windows Phone 7 features a more modern, tile-based interface that Microsoft believes will charm customers.
“We’re taking responsibility holistically for the product,” said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows Phone, in a previous interview with Wired.com. “It’s a very human-centric way of thinking about it. A real person is going to pick up a phone in their hand, choose one, buy it, leave the store, configure it and live with it for two years. That’s determined by the hardware, software, application and services. We’re trying to think about all those parts such that the human experience is great.”
Despite Microsoft’s efforts, Windows Phone 7 is off to a slow start. By the fourth quarter of 2010, Windows Phone 7 entered the market with lower share than the debuts of both Android and Palm’s WebOS, according to the NPD Group. Microsoft likely sees a partnership with Nokia as an opportunity to quickly gain some presence in phone hardware.
“The Windows Phone 7 ecosystem is still evolving because it’s newer, and market share is of course low,” said Ross Rubin, an NPD consumer technology analyst. ”The volume of handsets that Nokia delivers could certainly be a springboard for that ecosystem.”
The imminent partnership between Microsoft and Nokia has already drawn smack talk from Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering for Google. Gundotra on Wednesday published a tweet tagged “Feb. 11″ — the day that the Microsoft-Nokia partnership is supposed to be announced.
“Two turkeys do not make an Eagle,” Gundotra said.
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Photo: Nokia N8 (Jon Snyder/Wired.com)
The Internet Explorer 9 beta pleasantly surprised us with Microsoft’s renewed competitiveness in the web browser wars, and the pinnable, hardware-accelerated experience is getting even better today — you can download the IE9 release candidate right now, which streamlines and beautifies the tabbed browsing layout considerably, adds those previously promised, fully customizable tracking protection lists for privacy and freely toggled ActiveX filters, as well as an updated Javascript engine, geolocation support via HTML5, the ability to pin web apps to the taskbar, and a host of assorted speed and functionality improvements. Find the files you need at our source link below, and let us know if the Beauty of the Web captivates you this time around.
Update: We spoke to Microsoft IE9 privacy guru Andy Ziegler, and learned to our dismay that tracking protection lists won’t actually be included in the browser per se; rather, the company’s created a feature where you can generate your own lists or download ready-made one from providers like TRUSTe. The thing is, IE9 won’t suggest one for you, or even curate a group of them when you install — you’ll need to put on your power user hat and do the legwork there yourself.
Internet Explorer 9 RC now available to download, tracking protection in tow (update) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 13:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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If you don’t have a Windows Phone 7 device, you may have assumed that first major update with copy and paste support had been released to end users by now — and we wouldn’t necessarily blame you. If you do have a Windows Phone 7 device, however, you know how very untrue that is… and the latest rumors suggest that you won’t be on track to get it this month. To be fair, Microsoft never promised that we’d see the update on handsets in February in any official capacity, but rumors at one time had suggested it’d happen; of course, they also suggested January, so you see how that goes. Anyhow, both Neowin and ZDNet‘s Mary Jo Foley are liking March 8 as a possibility, citing the difficulties in getting carriers and manufacturers on board for a coordinated launch of a firmware update that they’re all accustomed to having more control over. Since early last year, Microsoft had said it’d be controlling platform updates pretty tightly — certainly more tightly than in the disjoint Android world — and we can imagine that takes a little bit of adaptation for the likes of LG and Samsung. Anyhow, here’s hoping everyone’s up to date on the 8th, eh?
Windows Phone 7’s copy and paste update now coming in March? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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It’s an important day for Windows Phone 7 users. No, not because the free Amazon app was just launched in the Windows Phone Marketplace. It’s because we get to test drive this Photoshop image in preparation for Friday. You feelin’ it?
[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Amazon app released for the newest Windows Phone 7 models originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Nokia will jump from the burning platform this Friday, but whither will it dive? Towards Microsoft and Windows Phone 7, as continually rumored, or towards Google and Android? Two turkeys told us the latter isn’t likely, and Bloomberg‘s anonymous sources seem to agree, saying that Nokia is indeed in the final stages of talks with Microsoft, and is “close to announcing a software partnership.” These spooks also say that Google was also in the running, but is no longer favored for the job, and as such we’re very likely to see Windows Phone 7 running on Nokia devices soon. We’re sure you’ll have some very strong opinions about that — we had a few ourselves — but please keep it clean in comments below!
Update: The Wall Street Journal just published a report of its own, by and large saying pretty much the same thing as BW. “If an agreement can be reached in time… Elop likely would announce the deal Friday.” The report also said an executive shakeup might be in the works, with “several senior members of the executive board expected to leave.” Show of hands, who all’s excited for Friday’s announcement?
Bloomberg: Nokia definitely in talks with Microsoft, partnership likely (update: WSJ, too) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Feb 2011 22:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Well, well. Just after Nokia CEO Stephan Elop’s “burning platform” memo leaked out and prompted intense speculation that Nokia would start building Windows Phone 7 handsets, Google’s Vic Gundotra tweeted “Two turkeys do not make an Eagle” prefaced with a #feb11 hashtag — the same day as Nokia’s Capital Markets Day event in London. That’s some pretty serious trash talk, and we’d say it pretty much takes an Android tie-up off the table — we doubt anyone from Google would run around calling Nokia a “turkey” if they were actually partners. Then again, Vic could just be talking about some extremely disturbing genetic engineering research he plans to unveil on Friday — really, anything is possible with Google.
Update: Oh snap. We were just reminded that there’s some serious history behind “two turkeys do not make an eagle” — it’s what former Nokia VP Anssi Vanjoki said in 2005 about BenQ buying Siemens’s failing handset business. (Ouch.) Of course, Vanjoki also just said that using Android is like peeing in your pants for warmth, so we suppose Gundotra’s been waiting for some payback — although his timing’s a little off, since Vanjoki just made a very public exit from Nokia after being denied the CEO job, Still, though — is any burn sweeter than the obscure European handset business history burn? We don’t think so. [Thanks, Seth]
Google’s Vic Gundotra on Nokia: ‘Two turkeys do not make an Eagle’ (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Feb 2011 10:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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